Billions of dollars are spent by cities and countries to prepare for summer and winter Olympics. Many stadiums, housing and other infrastructure are built to not only be able to handle the games, but also the enormous amount of people that will eventually inhabit the city for a few weeks. But, that’s just it, it’s only for a few weeks. What happens after the games are over and there’s no longer a need for an International Broadcast Center or a handball venue? In the past, the answer has been to let the area rot away and be a hotbed of vandalism, but Rio has taken a different approach.

The City of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil took a lot of heat for unfinished facilities, polluted waterways, down to the wire infrastructure finish dates, as well as a high number of construction worker fatalities during preparation before the games began. However, city officials and designers made an extremely smart decision when they decided to design the facilities using a concept called “nomadic architecture.”

Nomadic architecture allows the parts and pieces of the Olympic buildings to be easily dismantled and reused on other projects, effectively recycling the buildings. Several buildings used for the 2012 London Olympics also used this nomadic concept, but Rio has taken it to the next level. AECOM, who designed the Olympic structures in Rio, also created the master plan for London. The Future Arena and the Olympics Aquatic Center are the only true “nomadic” structures, out of the 30 total buildings, says Wired, but the others will be dismantled and the parts repurposed.

The city already knows exactly how the disassembled parts will be used in the future, too. The Olympic Aquatic Stadium will transform into two smaller pools in a different area of the city. Many of the building components from the Future arena will be used to build four schools. The broadcast center will be repurposed into a high school dormitory for gifted athletes.

It’s a positive sign that Olympic officials and host cities are beginning to understand the importance of sustainable and reusable structures. It hasn’t always been this way, even within the past decade. Beijing’s National Park, which housed the 2008 games, still stands as a tourist attraction and costs roughly $11 million a year to maintain, according to NPR. The Olympic Park in Athens, 2004’s host, lies abandoned and in a state of ruin (pictures here via The Guardian). The Bosnian Conflict in the early 90’s saw the 1984 Winter Olympics site used as an artillery launch position, according to WSMV in Nashville.

Tall buildings made with structural timber have been on the rise in Canada and European countries in recent years, but the United States has been slower to adopt the method due to code restrictions. The state of Oregon recently released an addendum to their building code to allow taller mass timber buildings in the state and an upcoming International Code Council (ICC) vote could encourage more states to follow suit.

You may have been sitting in your house or office one day and noticed the distinct sound of a bird hitting the window. It’s pretty common, as it’s estimated that as many as 988 million birds die in the US each year by colliding into glass. The new arena that will house the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks has incorporated some design elements that will reduce the amount of birds killed by the massive structure, allowing it to be dubbed the “World’s Most Bird Friendly Sports Arena.”

Dubai has been on the bleeding edge of pushing the boundaries of construction for over a decade. The famous Burj Khalifa, the current World’s Tallest Building, but the United Arab Emirates on the map. Since then, the country has poured money and resources into the construction industry and have sets their sights on a new challenge: 3D construction printing.

Across the United States, any mass timber building designed to be taller than six stories high has to receive special approval from the building codes department. After a recent addendum was added to the Oregon’s building code, the state has become the first in the country to allow high rise mass timber buildings without receiving any special considerations.

Since the dawn of green buildings, these projects have always been synonymous with LEED certification. The process of obtaining that LEED certification has not always been an easy one for contractors; there is a ton of paperwork and documentation that needs to take place in order to prove all LEED credits have been rightfully earned. A new construction standard, called BREEAM, is hoping to disrupt the United States’ green building certification world with its impending New Construction Standard Release in 2019.

One of the biggest hassles of site work in construction is the hauling away of spoils. It’s costly and time consuming to bring in truck after truck to take unneeded soil off to an unknown dump site. When Elon Musk and his team, The Boring Company, started digging a tunnel for a HyperLoop system in Los Angeles, they knew there had to be a better way to handle to soil than to haul it away.

With much talk about climate change both politically and socially, citizens and the business world have started to calculate the way in which climate change will alter how we live and work. In the past, the construction industry has made a number of speculations about how it would change as the planet gets warmer, however, changes have only started coming in light of the rising temperatures and their effects on the industry.

The USGBC recently released their 2017 data for the Top 10 US States for LEED construction, which is sorted by Gross Square Footage per Capita. That ranking system allows them to get a fair comparison of states, despite differences in population and number of buildings.

As the world not only becomes more familiar with green products, but also starts demanding them, researchers and contractors alike need to be ready to embrace the ever-changing world and meet their customer’s demands. Each year, new products are released that hoping to reduce waste or harness renewable energy sources, but only some of them reach the mass market.

Below are 8 green products, processes, and stories that we found most interesting in 2017:

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